Profs & Pints Nashville: Love/Sex/Magic

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Love/Sex/Magic,” an exploration of love magic, sex spells, and questions of desire and consent in early modern Europe, with Jessica C. Lowe, historian of early modern Europe and lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at Vanderbilt University.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/love-sex-magic .]

In early modern Europe, as in America today, people sought to secure sex, attract love and marriage, and make babies. Not everyone, however, could fulfill this ideal, so many ended up turning to practitioners of magic for the answers.

Learn in depth about how Europeans in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries turned to magic to solve their romantic woes with Jessica C. Lowe, who teaches Vanderbilt courses on “supernatural sexuality” and early modern European witch hunts.

Drawing heavily from her “supernatural sexuality” course, which examines how early modern beliefs in love magic, witches, werewolves, and vampires shaped our current ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality, Dr. Lowe will deliver a talk combining delicious parts of both Valentine’s Day and Halloween.

She’ll talk about how both sex and love magic were widespread across European society and across the European continent, and how both were practiced in fascinating ways.

Need to attract the attention of a woman? Find some bat blood and write her name on your hand. Invested in her virginity? Gather some vervain plants (under the right astrological conjunction) and make her sit on it while she prays, knowing that she’ll be compelled to flee if she is “defiled.”

Wanting to conceive a son? Roast some boar testicles and bring the warm pot to bed!

Were these helpful tools, or consoling beliefs, or coercive power? We’ll tackle these questions by considering the social construction of desire, coercion, and consent. Drawing from spell books and trial records, we’ll also look at love magic as both a belief system and an industry. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From “The Love Potion,” a 1903 painting by Evelyn De Morgan (De Morgan Centre / Wikimedia Commons).